[Tagging] (Soapy) Massage Parlour

[Guttorm Flatabø]

Hi Mishari,

2014-09-23 16:56 GMT+02:00 Mishari Muqbil <mishari at mishari.net>:

> I had an interesting conversation with legal today.
>

I'm assuming "legal" is a department at your workplace.


> Even if it's the truth, it's criminal libel if you state it as a
> brothel. There's an interesting saying which you can Google that goes
>

That is too bad for you in Thailand. Makes me wonder what other facts you
are prohibited from stating.

The people who will be liable under the Computer Crimes Act are those
> who enter the information, those who host and those who display the
> information. So for example, website A shows a map containing a POI in
> Thailand tagged as a brothel, a police report can be filed to have owner
> of website A prosecuted.
>

I understand better why you are concerned then. In reality it makes you
unable (/criminal) to map certain things because you are in Thailand. Even
if these "parlours" were to be mapped as amenity=brothel on OSM, a Thai
online map service could still show them as "soapland" on a map. One could
perhaps also argue that you as a Thai user perhaps could tag these as
amenity=brothel + brothel=soapland and not be libelous because you were
using the "International OSM" definition of brothel and not the Thai
version of brothel (which is unlawful and therefore does not exist)? If
every online map service in Thailand is to be liable for everything that
the map displays, to such a degree, it makes it very hard to use OSM data
in Thailand.

I've also been advised that Thailand is not the only country with this
> legal concept and that as we should be mindful and cautious of this.
>

I am pretty sure that for most free countries this isn't much of an issue,
at least not for the OSM user doing the tagging. Civil liberties isn't
where Thailand does best...

--
Guttorm Flatabø
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